1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of legal analysis and, more specifically, the present invention relates to the field of automated legal analysis over a communications network.
2. Description of the Related Art
The evaluation of a legal case or a legal scenario can be a complex undertaking. There are often a myriad of state and federal laws and regulations, as well as judge-made law, which must be taken into account in order to reach a thorough and complete legal conclusion. Often, the facts surrounding the legal situation itself can be a difficult to understand and categorize. A criminal case involving forensic accounting, for example, may include the consideration of thousands of individual facts. The complexity of such an analysis is compounded by the fact that new legislation and court decisions are issued every day that can have an effect on the legal analysis being made. For example, the U.S. Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issues ten to twenty decisions on any given work day, any of which can make a difference in a legal analysis involving patent law. In light of the above, it is no wonder that billions of dollars are expended every year in the U.S. in the course of evaluating legal situations.
Various approaches to the problems of complex legal analysis have been disclosed. The conventional approach utilized by the majority of the legal industry today involves the time-honored routine of having an attorney or team of attorneys and other legal professionals amass all relevant facts associated with a legal scenario, conduct legal research into all relevant laws, regulations and court decisions, and write legal memorandums to explore each legal issue separately. After all of the facts have been pored over and all applicable laws have been evaluated in light of the facts, the attorney(s) generate a theory of the case, which is typically asserted in a final legal memorandum. Other than using computers to perform the tasks above, the aforementioned conventional system of legal analysis has not changed in more than a century. As a result, when a prospective client walks into a modern lawyer's office and requests an evaluation of his case, it can often take weeks or months and many thousands of dollars until such an evaluation is complete.
One popular automated approach, often employed by vendors of tools to legal providers, involves the use of an inference engine. Modern inference engines in the legal industry typically involve sets of if-then rules that are executed to reach a legal conclusion or evaluation. The user of the inference engine begins by entering the facts of the case, often as answers to questions posed to the user, into a computer interface that reads the entries. Any if-then statements that match the given facts are executed, the result of which is a legal conclusion or final legal evaluation.
The approaches above, however, have their drawbacks. One problem with the conventional approach is its limited usability by a single user. Due to the sheer magnitude of laws, regulations and facts surrounding certain complex cases, it is simply not possible for a single attorney or other legal professional to absorb all of the applicable data and make a sound legal conclusion. Thus, in complex cases, teams of legal professionals must be employed to accomplish the task. This can be extremely costly and time intensive. Another problem with the conventional approach is user error. Since humans cannot perform at 100% accuracy for extended periods of time, there is the risk that the evaluation of hundreds of laws, regulations and court decisions may include mistakes that affect the accuracy of the final legal conclusion of the legal professional. This is an unacceptable risk in cases where large amounts of money or the freedom of the client is at stake. Finally, legal professionals are subject to their own biases, due to the party represented (plaintiff or defendant), gender, race, etc. This can cloud a legal professional's judgment and affect the accuracy of his or her legal evaluation.
One problem with both the conventional approach and the inference engine approach is the lack of the ability to account for probabilities in legal evaluations. An inference engine using if-then statements, for example, reaches a hard and fast conclusion or result. That is, the result may be a “yes” or “no.” In the legal world, however, guarantees of a win or loss in any given case are rarely given, since the final decision maker is a person or persons—i.e., a judge, board or jury—and decisions can vary widely. For this reason, probabilities would be a more accurate method for presenting a legal analysis. Further, the approaches above do not provide a mechanism for showing or explaining the relationships between the given facts of the case and the legal conclusions or analysis. Thus, this limits the ability of the aforementioned approaches to educate the user on how various aspects of the legal scenario interact with each other. Lastly, the approaches above do not adequately account for the fast paced issuance of new laws, regulations and court decisions that could affect the result of a legal evaluation. This brings into question the validity of any legal conclusion reached by a system that does not take the most recent laws into account.
Therefore, what is needed is a system and method for improving the problems with the prior art, and more particularly for a more efficient method and system for evaluating legal situations and scenarios.